Wednesday, October 26, 2016

This was my writing routine
today: sit for a few minutes before the screen, pull books down from the
shelves to re-read favorite passages; check Twitter, drink tea, pace around.
Repeat.

This was one of the books I
pulled down from the shelf: The Magician’s
Land by Lev Grossman. The last in a trilogy of books that I love—a series
that moved me deeply and changed how I write. I opened the book to a quote I’d
underlined:

“She
was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books
did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please,
please just be somewhere and somebody else.”

Yes. That’s what books have
always been for me: a magic that takes me elsewhere and allows me to be, even if just for a few moments, somebody else.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

As an ex-scientist who has at
times dipped into the scientist-writer blogosphere (yes, there is such a
thing), I had heard of the name Hope Jahren. I think I read one or two of her entertaining,
funnier blog posts. I read a powerful op-ed piece she wrote in the New York
Times about the sexism many women face in science. But none of this prepared me
for her memoir, Lab Girl.

I did not expect the lyricism
with which Jahren writes of her childhood in Minnesota: the winter nights that
she accompanied her father to his physics lab at a community college, which
seemed a wonderland to the little girl. The tangible coldness she evokes when
she writes of walking back home with her father afterward, through the Minnesota
snow. I did not expect the lyrical evocation of a different type of coldness:
the emotional distances within her reserved Scandinavian family.

But just as I was settling in
for a literary memoir of the quietly lyrical mode, the story changed.

Dr. Jahren is a professor of
geobiology at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Lab Girl is a story about science. It’s about the passion of work,
a dedication to a calling. Academic scientists of all disciplines, I would
expect, will nod and wince at her ruthlessly honest descriptions of
all-nighters in the lab, the pressures of obtaining grant funding, the tedium and
frustrations of experiments as well as the joys. Interspersed with the
autobiographical narrative are short, beautifully written chapters about the
life of plants. Jahren turns photosynthesis into poetry. Willows are “the
Rapunzels” of the trees, with their long, drooping branches. These lessons on
botany also double as commentary on the larger narrative. Jahren writes “A seed
knows how to wait,” and then tells us of how a lotus seed was found which
waited dormant for two thousand years before bursting forth into growth when
conditions were right. She writes of a horsetail plant, Equistetum ferrissii, which breaks off into pieces to establish
itself elsewhere, thus spreading itself throughout America. The horsetail
chapter immediately precedes a chapter in which she details her move from
Berkeley, California to Atlanta to establish a new lab. Subtle? No,
but the metaphor is beautifully effective.

Lab Girl is a number of
things: scientific bildungsroman, lyrical science writing, evocations of
emotional growth and pain. But it’s also a series of rollicking, astonishingly
funny, gasp-inducing hijinks. Jahren’s partner in these hijinks is Bill, her
loyal lab manager who sticks with her through. . . everything. When she doesn’t
have the funding to pay him a decent wage, he doesn’t quit to look for a new
job (he has a bachelor’s degree in soil chemistry from Berkeley, so that would
seem an option). Instead, he moves into the lab to sleep and continues working
outrageous hours. Hope Jahren and Bill meet during a field course where she’s a
graduate instructor and he an undergrad. From that moment, they become best
friends, soul mates, partners in crime. Together, they establish labs at three different universities. They are both brilliant, dedicated,
and exceedingly quirky (wait till you get to the chapter where Bill cuts off
his long hair, or when they lead their students on an epic road trip from
Atlanta to San Francisco). Jahren acknowledges that people don’t know what to
make of their bond. She’s happily married to another man, and has a son with
him. But she and Bill “. . . eat almost every meal together, our finances are
mixed, and we tell each other everything. We travel together, work together,
finish each other’s sentences, and have risked our lives for each other. . .
people that I meet still seem to want a label for what is between us. . . I do
us because us is what I know how to do.”

And so, this strange, brave
memoir of science and passion, of growing up and finding one’s way, finds its
own center in the friendship between Jahren and Bill. The passage in which Jahren
escapes her first academic position for a better one, and describes what Bill’s
loyalty meant to her during this time, is perhaps the most moving one in the book.
Jahren and Bill are both troubled, emotionally wounded souls, and yet the
source of those wounds are only delicately hinted at. A different memorist
would have dived deep into familial dynamics and estrangements. Jahren circles
around it. Her difficult relationship with her mother is an aching hole in the
narrative--approached, but not closely. Jahren beautifully describes what it’s
like to solve mysteries at the interface of geology and botany, but perhaps the most haunting aspect
of this memoir is how it delicately evokes the unanswerable mysteries of the human
heart.